Hitherto attempts to bring this question to an issue have run aground on the real or fancied jeopardy to paramount national interests.

How, if at all, this issue might affect national interests and international relations, would obviously depend in the first instance on the state of the given national establishment and the character of the international engagements entered into in the formation of this projected pacific league.

It is always conceivable that the transactions involving so ubiquitous an issue might come to take on an international character and that they might touch the actual or fanciful interests of these diverse nations with such divergent effect as to bring on a rupture of the common understanding between them and of the peace-compact in which the common understanding is embodied.
* * * * * In the beginning, that is to say in the beginnings out of which this modern era of the Western civilisation has arisen, with its scheme of law and custom, there grew into the scheme of law and custom, by settled usage, a right of ownership and of contract in disposal of ownership,--which may or may not have been a salutary institutional arrangement on the whole, under the circumstances of the early days.
With the later growth of handicraft and the petty trade in Western Europe this right of ownership and contract came to be insisted on, standardised under legal specifications, and secured against molestation by the governmental interests; more particularly and scrupulously among those peoples that have taken the lead in working out that system of free or popular institutions that marks the modern civilised nations.

So it has come to be embodied in the common law of the modern world as an inviolable natural right.

It has all the prescriptive force of legally authenticated immemorial custom.
Under the system of handicraft and petty trade this right of property and free contract served the interest of the common man, at least in much of its incidence, and acted in its degree to shelter industrious and economical persons from hardship and indignity at the hands of their betters.